from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Diamonds are usually considered expensive rare gems, but they're also just an allotrope of carbon that could be a useful semiconductor material someday. Giant diamonds floating in space could be relatively common, but there's no practical way to go space mining for them. Diamonds aren't easy to make, but some folks are getting better at it.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The promise of large-scale human expansion into space has been around for a long time, and we've already passed countless fiction-proposed deadlines for such a development. Still, while we're not living in moon cities as many may have predicted, we're constantly taking unprecedented steps outwards. Here are just a few of the latest:

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Studies have shown that spore-forming bacteria can survive in space under certain conditions, so it doesn't seem so implausible that life -- as we know it -- has accomplished interplanetary travel successfully. Extremophiles living in unexpected places also seems to suggest mounting evidence that life exists on other worlds, even though we have no direct proof of extraterrestrial beings (yet). Here are just a few links related to the growing field of astrobiology.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The universe is a big place, so it's possible to find pretty much anything you can think of -- if you're patient enough to scan the vastness of space. Here are just a few weird planets that astronomers have found recently.

from the oops dept

You may recall a few weeks ago, we wrote about the discovery of the first "potentially life-sustaining planet" outside of our solar system, which got some astronomers so excited that one declared the chance of life on the planet to be 100%. Of course, he may want to adjust his optimism a bit downwards as Slashdot points us to the news that another group of astronomers are saying they can't find any trace of the planet:

But at this week's Astrophysics of Planetary Systems meeting, astronomer Francesco Pepe of the Geneva Observatory and the Swiss group reported that he and his colleagues could find no reliable sign of a fifth planet in Gliese 581's habitable zone. They used only their own observations, but they expanded their published data set from what the U.S. group included in its analysis to a length of 6.5 years and 180 measurements. "We do not see any evidence for a fifth planet ... as announced by Vogt et al.," Pepe wrote Science in an e-mail from the meeting. On the other hand, "we can't prove there is no fifth planet." No one yet has the required precision in their observations to prove the absence of such a small exoplanet, he notes.

Astronomer Paul Butler, a member of the U.S. team who is at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., says he can't comment on the Swiss work because he wasn't at the meeting and the data are unpublished. He notes, however, that more observations will likely be needed to solidify the existence of Gliese 581g. "I would expect that on the time scale of a year or two this should be settled."

So, perhaps before we declare it 100% likely to have life, we should make sure it actually exists.

from the M-class dept

Just as the rumors of a UN-appointed alien ambassador are settling down, astrophysicists have reported the discovery of the first potentially life-sustaining planet outside of our solar system. This conclusion is based on 11 years of observations and some estimates that place this newly-found exoplanet in a region that would allow for the existence of liquid water and an atmosphere on Gliese 581g. However, that doesn't necessarily mean water or an atmosphere actually exist there.

The more important news here is that this type of planet can be found in a relatively straightforward manner -- which will likely lead to many, many more discoveries of similar planets in the universe. However, instead of focusing on that, reporters and one of the scientists involved are hyping up the possibility of life. Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at University of California Santa Cruz, optimistically states:

"Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say that the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent. I have almost no doubt about it"

It seems a bit unscientific to project a 100% chance, especially given that our own solar system has more than one planet that could be classified as potentially habitable -- and we've yet to confirm that life exists (or existed) on any other planet (or moon) that orbits our sun. And before we start charting a course towards Gliese 581 to meet up with new life forms, perhaps we should wait until a few more exoplanets are detected with similar characteristics.